December 12–19, 1996

book quarterly|Book Quarterly Winter `96

What Did They See In Us?

What Did They See In Us?

By Bill Heinzen

Imagining Philadelphia

By Philip Stevick, University of Pennsylvania Press, 204 p., $22.95

A man from my hometown of Minneapolis is writing a Grishamesque mystery novel set in Philadelphia — boring lawyer finds romance and corruption — and he asked me to explain the city to him.

Explaining Philadelphia is surprisingly difficult. Is it really the "City of Brotherly Love," or, as S.J. Perelman said, the "City of Bleak November Afternoons?" I lamely advised him to wander City Hall — the incarnation of Philadelphia's baroque and soiled beauty. Like City Hall, Philadelphia's appeal is in the details, but there are so many details that its message is unclear.

In Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present, Temple professor Philip Stevick examines two centuries of writing by visitors to Philadelphia. He dissects their often lyric descriptions of such seemingly prosaic sites as the Fairmount Waterworks and Eastern State Penitentiary and frames them with recent work on urban America. Stevick presents these descriptions as one half of a dialogue about Philadelphia and urban America since 1800, and his book offers impressionistic answers to questions that visitors asked and implied.

Some of the questions are general to cities: What is so striking about the presence of nature — or "Nature" — in an urban space? Others are specific to Philadelphia: Why does Center City compel one to walk? Why do descriptions of this city so often fluctuate between dream and nightmare, such as one traveler's eerily familiar description of the city in the 1860s: "...in the main street of Philadelphia at two a.m., I met neither thief nor policeman, nor living soul."

Perhaps the ultimate question is why so many people hate Philadelphia. Stevick notes that Philadelphia is "a little different from anywhere else," and visitors sketch a distinctly teenage personality— sleepy, awkward, usually well-intentioned but trouble-prone: "corrupt and contented," in Lincoln Steffens' phrase. Like an adolescent, the city is secretly enamored of its underachievement; self-love easily segues into quiet resignation.

Stevick also suggests that history, the city's strongest feature, undermines Philadelphia's present by emphasizing the distance from that more glorious past. The past does filter out much of Philadelphia's beauty. Our least important assets have become iconic, like the bizarre Liberty Bell or the equally stupid Betsy Ross House, while sites of greater beauty and significance do not register.

Independence Hall, for example, is a lovely pile of corners and curves. Yet it is also an ambiguous structure and symbol, perhaps because our grasp of history is uncertain, or perhaps because Philadelphians are so blunted by the muddy tyranny of brick that we can no longer distinguish beauty from hospital annexes.

To most visitors, Philadelphia is Center City, and, except for the Wissahickon and brief excursions to Germantown, Stevick rarely strays from the middle. Even though ethnic and racial diversity characterized Center City well into the 19th century, the book contains little evidence of Irish, Italian or Jewish Philadelphians, and aside from a sunny comment by Dizzy Gillespie, African Americans are absent, despite such fundamental 19th-century works as visitor W.E.B. DuBois' richly detailed study of The Philadelphia Negro, which is based almost exclusively in Center City.

I am not sure whether this illustrates a flaw in the book or in the typical visitor, who, ostensibly craving the different, is nonetheless drawn to the familiar. A marked exception was Eastern State Penitentiary, where close contact with the inmates fascinated and repelled visitors like Charles Dickens. Regardless, this well-written book is fascinating (and never repulsive), and it helps to understand why it is so hard to articulate affection for this gray Quaker town.

Philadelphians will doubtlessly continue to be pleased when visitors find beauty here, but not surprised if their impressions are brief, dismissive or even surreal. We are therefore wounded but can understand why visitor Albert Camus, who devoted pages of his fiction to urban landscapes, observed only that "(i)n Philadelphia, enormous gas tanks tower over little cemeteries full of flowers."